Feds give N.S. more time to get off coal

Nova Scotia will get a desperately sought break from federal greenhouse gas emission rules, but some worry about the effect this will have on Canada’s climate change policy.

The province had argued the federal rules for moving off coal power would be cripplingly expensive. It pushed for an equivalency agreement wherein provincial regulations would take precedence.

Last Friday, the government gave official notice that it was granting the equivalency agreement and waiving Nova Scotia from federal emissions standards until 2030.

Ottawa said the move is to “avoid duplication of effort in controlling greenhouse gas emissions.” In effect, it gives Nova Scotia more time to wean itself off coal.

While the federal rules start to take effect next year, Nova Scotia laws allow for a gradual winding down of emissions from the electricity sector through to 2030.

That should give the province enough time to complete the subsea transmission line to Newfoundland to bring in hydro power from the lower Churchill River plant in Labrador.

Without the agreement, the province argued it would have to prematurely close coal plants at a cost of $1.3 billion to ratepayers.

Green Leader Elizabeth May is skeptical of the deal.

Because of the difference in provincial and federal laws, May said no one knows for sure whether the end results will actually be equivalent.

New Brunswick is also working on an equivalency agreement, although it has not been finalized. May said the federal government is continuing a trend of stepping away from enforcing environmental laws.

“It’s a political decision to opt out for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, out of federal regs. Sitting here right now, I can’t tell you whether that’s good or bad for greenhouse gas reduction.”

Halifax MP Megan Leslie, the NDP environment critic, begs to differ.

Leslie said forcing the province to meet Ottawa’s timelines would be disastrous because the only way to meet the laws would be to switch coal plants to natural gas.

“Why would you unjustly force a province to make that kind of colossal transition, because that will be a lot of money, that will then just lock them into another fossil fuel?”

Although natural gas plants have lower emissions than coal-fired plants, she said the switch would be a short-term fix that would cause long-term problems.

The provincial Environment Act calls for Nova Scotia to lower its emissions to 7.5 million tonnes, or megatonnes, of carbon dioxide in 2020 from 9.6 megatonnes in 2010.

Nova Scotia would then face a cap of an average of 9.2 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per year from 2021 to 2024.

The cap lowers to six megatonnes in 2025, an average of 5.4 megatonnes for the following four years and then 4.5 megatonnes in 2030.

These caps will actually end up being much stricter than the federal laws, said P.J. Partington, former senior analyst with the Pembina Institute.

Partington said the equivalency agreement is certainly justified in Nova Scotia’s case. But he also said he fears the Conservative government is fragmenting Canada’s climate policy into a patchwork of different rules in different provinces.

“Equivalency agreements are not the cause of this fragmentation so much as a symptom of the leadership vacuum in Ottawa,” Partington wrote on his website, pjpartington.com.

The federal government posted a draft agreement of the deal in 2012 and invited public comment. There were only two submissions, both from “industry stakeholders” who supported the equivalency deal.